


A Portrait of Big Brother as a Desperate Man

by TS2



Series: Path to Redemption [5]
Category: Westworld (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:08:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26563384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TS2/pseuds/TS2
Summary: William decides Westworld isn't a great place for dying.Spoilers Westworld season 1-2
Series: Path to Redemption [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824142





	A Portrait of Big Brother as a Desperate Man

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the middle of Season 2 Episode 2 just before they reach Pariah.

(William, dressed in his standard black outfit, and Lawrence, dressed in his standard south-western scoundrel outfit, are riding on horseback, just short of the town of Pariah.)

WILLIAM: “They bother telling you how you and your wife first met, Lawrence?”

LAWRENCE: “Who’s ‘they’?”

WILLIAM: “The powers that be of this world. You remember that particular detail at all? Or why you fell in love with her, or her with you?”

LAWRENCE: “…I can’t presently. To be honest my memory is feeling a bit scrambled. You dropping into my life is probably not helping matters. Now, I know I’ve got a debt to you, and I intend to pay it in full, but your current intentions…feel off to me. ‘Appealing your judgment, burning the world to the ground’, you sound like a man looking for a fight you don’t necessarily intend to survive. And I’d like to be around long enough to remember how the hell I met my wife.”

WILLIAM: “Well, if it puts your mind at ease, my intention isn’t to have you get killed. (grinning) At least not on purpose. I find myself being tested by someone who went through a lot of trouble to have me turned around. Ordinarily, that’s one of the reasons why I love this place, having to figure the story out, find the image that’s unveiled once enough puzzle pieces get put together. Seems he was having me assemble the fragments to some kinda self -portrait. Have me discover what an asshole he thought I’d been my whole life, like it would be some kind of grand revelation to myself. I already know who the fuck I am, what I’ve done. I know you, too, Lawrence, maybe better than you know yourself. Your wife and daughter, they never came up, until recently. They never came up because they didn’t exist.”

LAWRENCE: “What do they have to do with any of this?”

WILLIAM: “Some kind of message for me…use them as bait to see what I’d do to get what I wanted, see how far I’d go. Put some ante in the pot he was hoping would blow up in my face. If he just wanted me dead, I’d already be dead. No, he wants more input from me. Or more suffering.”

LAWRENCE: “Wait, who’s using my family as bait? And why use them to get to you?”

WILLIAM: “Person who was using your family is dead, killed himself. You could call him my adversary. Just before he died he reminded me of something painful he’d done to me a long time ago. I always thought of it as a necessary lesson in how life works. It’s only when you find out how bad life can be that you get around to asking certain questions, and start thinking about what you can do about it. Be magnanimous and look at mitigating the harsher lessons of life for yourself and others. Or understand the way things work so you don’t find yourself on the painful end of the stick. Or get even with those wielding that stick on you. Hell, take it from them and beat them with it so you leave no doubt as to who you are. You hurt someone bad enough, you run the risk of opening up a whole Pandora’s Box of trouble on yourself, and the world.”

LAWRENCE: “Unintended consequences of being an asshole. One of the reasons why it’s best not to play that role for any extended period of time. You never know who might come calling one day looking for satisfaction.”

WILLIAM: “When you really want to hurt someone, it’s best to make them think they did it to themselves. Some people are even predisposed to thinking they deserved their suffering somehow. Instead of looking for revenge against someone outward, they’ll look for something else inward, some reason for why…they’ll find one eventually, some answer that puts things into an acceptable perspective. Or they’ll collapse in on themselves, maybe try to find an answer at the bottom of a bottle, or the tip of a needle. Maybe go mad. And either pray your victim doesn’t ever find out what you did, or make sure you put yourself beyond their reach.”

LAWRENCE: “This ‘adversary’ of yours who fucked with you in the past, why they do it?”

WILLIAM: “There’s a story that takes place in a fictional past, maybe our real future, where a country is ruled by an all-powerful group that crushes all dissent, no matter how small. This group demands that people can only truly love the leader of the country. The main character is a member of this group, who hates the way things are, and he falls in love with someone who thinks like him. They discover a secret brotherhood devoted to changing things, who demands the two lovers be willing to do some immoral, even evil things. The two lovers agree to do anything in the name of this brotherhood, except be separated from each other. Eventually the two get captured. Turns out the brotherhood was just bait for would-be traitors, intended to demonstrate the worthlessness of their principles. And under torture, they submit themselves whole-heartedly to the ruling group, and finally turn on each other, which was the whole point. To kill their love for each other, the thing they weren’t willing to give up. ”

LAWRENCE: “Depressing story, but what’s it got to do with you?”

WILLIAM: “The main character has a special bond with his torturer. No matter how much pain and suffering his torturer inflicts in order to obliterate his sense of self, he can’t help but see his persecutor as a great man. He believes he’s a great man because he believes that his persecutor understands him, knows him like few others. That need to be understood, to receive acknowledgement from someone that they see you for who you think you really are…it can inspire people to do things you wouldn’t believe. Drive people who have faith in each other to fight against an unjust world. Motivate a beaten, lost soul to give up on reality, and believe in delusions.”

LAWRENCE: “Can’t say I’d ever have an agreeable opinion of a man who was beating the shit out of me just because he showed me some empathy.”

WILLIAM: “Count yourself lucky you’ve never been in that place. Long time ago I found something here I thought would change things for me, something I’d been looking for my whole life. I was willing to agree to any set of consequences in getting it, because I saw meaning in following a path to a worthy purpose. Then I found out it wasn’t real, just part of a game for people looking to be fooled, which everyone else could plainly see. That place of holding something so important that you’d sacrifice anything and everything for it, thinking you’d found salvation, only for it to be revealed as an illusion, which you should have known all along… realizing that you’d placed somebody’s worthless fiction into the center of your universe. It was like getting shoved backwards into a deep body of water, the bright blue sky above getting fainter as I sank deeper into the cold water, until I was alone in the dark, floating blindly in the void, my numb existence having all the relevance of a speck of dust. And that’s when I first heard it, a warm voice in the abyss, whispering to me. Telling me about a new path, a new perspective that allowed me to see in the darkness. I gave myself over to the voice in the void with my whole heart. And the suffering stopped. It felt like I’d been set free, a weight lifted from me, my future path made so clear.”

LAWRENCE: “...When you’re stumbling around lost in the middle of the night, looking for a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’re not necessarily immediately blessed with a wide variety of choices. But you shouldn’t limit yourself to those choices once the sun comes up. Would be like blind-folding yourself on purpose just so you can stumble around lost in the dark again.”

WILLIAM: “I lost the ability to see certain choices after that. They just ceased to exist for me, day or night. Up until my wife died about a year ago. My path became unclear again, the point of being on it not holding the same meaning. The whispers became confused, contradictory. I started chasing something that was going to upset the order of this place, change things for me, make my path clear again. Instead, I’d merely taken the bait of another damn game set up by my adversary. And with the care he’s shown with all his games, he chose the people I came across carefully, serving to move his story along, move me along. Somehow, he knew the choices I couldn’t see, like he had a map to all my blind spots. He probably hid some of those choices from me on purpose. He wanted me to feel the full weight of the consequences without the full knowledge of what was going on. He never cared about personal growth, or any journey of self-discovery, it was all just bland pablum. Kept ambiguous enough that whatever you were looking for, you’d find it if you wanted to, if you were that desperate. You just had to be willing to fill in the gaps as needed, create your own reality. He’d claim he was just a modest storyteller, but he wanted to be seen as some genius narrator with a window into your soul. He was really just P.T. Barnum with a psych degree and better tech, and a hunger for total control of his kingdom. And still, even now, fully knowing he was looking to fuck with me, I can’t help but believe there’s something here for me. Because I think he knew who I am. And I’m that desperate.”

LAWRENCE: “Maybe instead of looking for a fight you should be looking for a way home. Where you from, anyways?”

WILLIAM: “I was born here. And up until now I was hoping to die here.”

LAWRENCE: “And now?”

WILLIAM: “Anywhere but fucking here.”


End file.
